This week in education news, boosting student interest in STEM is important if we want to win the STEM race; there is an increase in STEM-related toys; U.S. Dept. of Education launches comprehensive internal review of the Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education grant program; American workers need to take advantage of artificial intelligence through new skills and learning programs; new survey highlights the national landscape of mathematics intervention (MI) classes in the middle grades; and the Hawaii Board of Education adopted K-12 Computer Science Standards.

Lab Coats Help Students See Themselves As Future Scientists

In order to encourage more of the nation’s young people to pursue careers in science, it pays to help them dress the part. That is the key finding of a study conducted recently to determine what kind of effect a simple article of clothing – in this case white lab coats – have on students’ confidence in their ability to do science. Read the article featured in The Conversation.

Winning The STEM Race Means Boosting Interest

America is woefully behind the rest of the world in preparing workers for the jobs of today and tomorrow. An estimated 3 million jobs are unfilled in America because not enough workers have the necessary STEM skills to do them. While economists, educators, and policymakers have attempted to increase teaching and training in STEM to meet this demand, one problem has gone largely unaddressed: boosting student interest in STEM. Teach math and science all you want, but if students don’t get excited about pursuing careers in STEM, it’s wasted effort. Read the article featured in Education Week.

The Rise Of The STEM Toy

While the subjects that comprise the acronym STEM aren’t new, grouping these subjects of study — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — into a pedagogical approach didn’t become a trend in educational circles until the early 2000s. Today, as the movement has gained momentum across the globe, more parents are taking action when faced with traditional curricula that don’t offer their children the kind of content and pedagogy that will best prepare them for a career of innovation and problem-solving. Some families are advocating for better courses or enrolling their children in extracurricular STEM programs, while others have turned to the marketplace to find the answer they seek. Read the article featured in Forbes.

Education Department Launches ‘Top-To-Bottom’ Review Of Teachers’ Grant Program

The Department of Education has launched a new “top-to-bottom” internal review of all aspects of the Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education grant program. Officials say that the review is aimed at fixing the issues and that the department is “absolutely committed to improving” the program. Read the article featured on NPR.org.

America Needs Workforce With Technology Skills For The Future

While artificial intelligence has been successful in delivering benefits to people in health care, food delivery, energy and transportation, there exists widespread concern that artificial intelligence will make several types of jobs obsolete, including those sectors like finance. As such, it is more important than ever to teach American workers to take advantage of artificial intelligence through new skills and learning programs. But what should the actual programs look like? The answer is not obvious, given that the relative earnings power of a college degree has been flattening in recent years. If college is not enough, then what is? Read the opinion piece featured in The Hill.

We Should Teach Math Like It’s A Language

The United States has a math problem, and, like most middle school students sitting down with their homework, we are not finding any easy solutions. Young people in this country are struggling to attain the proficiency necessary to pursue the careers our economy desperately needs. Universities bemoan students’ inability to complete college-level math. Each year thousands of newly admitted college students are placed in non-credit-bearing remedial courses in math, a path that immediately puts them at higher risk of not completing a degree. Read the article featured in Education Week.

National Survey On Supporting Struggling Mathematics Learners In The Middle Grades

In the 2016–17 school year, more than half of the schools that served grades 6-8 provided math intervention classes all three years, finds a survey by the nonprofit Education Development Center. The survey, based on a nationally representative sample of urban and suburban public schools, also found that only 21 percent of those classes focused just on enhancing grade-level content; 35 percent focused on helping students master foundational concepts from earlier grades, and 44 percent covered both. Read the article featured in Education Week.

Computer Science Programs To Increase In Hawaii Schools

The Hawaii Board of Education has adopted the National Computer Science Teachers Association’s K-12 Computer Science Standards, joining a growing national movement. Legislators on May 1 passed a bill that provides $500,000 for teacher training in computer science and mandates every public high school to offer the subject by 2021. The bill awaits Gov. David Ige’s signature. Read the article by the Associated Press.

Teach Students To Plan In Reverse, Study Suggests

Common sense says making a plan is a good way to reach a goal. But how do you go about making a plan? Starting from the finish and working backward gets the best results, a new study suggests. Read the article featured in Education Week.

Stay tuned for next week’s top education news stories.

The Communication, Legislative & Public Affairs (CLPA) team strives to keep NSTA members, teachers, science education leaders, and the general public informed about NSTA programs, products, and services and key science education issues and legislation. In the association’s role as the national voice for science education, its CLPA team actively promotes NSTA’s positions on science education issues and communicates key NSTA messages to essential audiences.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

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Uncovering Student Ideas in Science: 25 Formative Assessment Probes, Volume 1, Second Edition by Page Keeley offers a variety of formative assessment probes that will help teachers gain insight into students’ thinking on 60 core science concepts.  

Like the first edition of volume 1, this book helps pinpoint what your students know (or think they know) so you can monitor their learning and adjust your teaching accordingly. The probes are now aligned to A Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards. All probes include detailed instructions about how to administer them and suggested questions to ask to engage students in the issues the results raise. Also, each probe in the book includes extensive resources that can help both teachers and students. The book includes lists of NSTA journal articles, books, and online resources that can be used to enrich classroom lessons. Spanish versions of all the formative assessment probes are included in this updated edition.

“Formative assessment probes tell you what students really think and have inside their heads, rather than what students think the teacher wants to hear. They provide information about students’ ideas that typical questions and assessments do not reveal,” said Keeley.

Classroom assessments serve multiple purposes, including diagnosing, monitoring, providing feedback, evaluating, and measuring student learning. Using formative assessment probes can help teachers to identify and address students’ misunderstandings, whether this is background information students bring to the lesson or confusion that sets in along the way.

Each formative assessment probe in the book is a two-tiered question. The first tier consists of a prompt and answer choices that include distracters and a “best answer” choice. “Since the answer choices are designed to mirror the research on commonly held ideas, it is highly likely that students will select one that is similar to their thinking,” said Keeley.

The second tier is the explanation. Students have to explain their thinking in support of their answer choice. Through these explanations, teachers can gain insight into student thinking.

“Formative assessment probes enable teachers to probe for and quickly and efficiently examine a multitude of ideas their students hold, including misconceptions and partially correct ideas. Many educators and researchers prefer to collectively call these ideas alternative conceptions—meaning that students’ ideas are not always completely wrong, even though they may differ from those of a scientist,” said Keeley. “The probes also uncover critical-thinking and reasoning strategies students use to support their ideas. These strategies can be based on intuition, logic, everyday experiences, or application of scientific knowledge.”

The book features formative assessment probes addressing scientific areas such as light, sound, matter, gravity, heat, temperature, Earth, space, and life. Check out the free sample chapter.

This book is also available as an e-book.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

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Shadows can be explored outdoors all year long.

Your children may have declared, “It’s summer!” if they have noticed the rising air temperatures as measured with a thermometer or as sensed in a relative way (freezing-cold-chilly-cool-warm-warmer-hot-really really hot). Planting in an outside garden or pot is another marker of summer, as is the opening of outdoor public swimming pools the weekend before Memorial Day. In the northern hemisphere, meteorological summer includes June, July, and August; meteorological fall includes September, October, and November;  meteorological winter includes December, January, and February; and meteorological spring includes March, April, and May.

The season of summer may have arrived, as defined by hot weather, but the astronomical season of summer won’t begin until about 6 AM Eastern time (10 AM in  UTC—Coordinated Universal Time) on June 21, known as the summer solstice, or the longest day of the year. Occasionally children (and even adults) will get into a dispute about when summer truly begins. You can ask, “What information or data will help us decide when summer begins?”

Graphic model of Earth-Sun system to explain the seasons.

For information on the astronomical seasons, see the National Centers for Environmental Information, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The astronomical seasons are based on the position of Earth in relation to the sun, whereas the meteorological seasons are based on the annual temperature cycle. Refresh your understanding of the cause of seasonal changes by reading the explanation on the NASA Space Place. Then use the activities in these two columns published in the NSTA journal, Science and Children, to model the cause of seasons for yourself:

Science 101: What causes the seasons? by William C. Richardson. January 2007. Science and Children. 44(5): 54-57

Science Shorts: The Reasons for the Seasons by Julie Lee Lambert and Suzanne Smith Sundburg. April/May 2010. Science and Children. 47(8): 67-70

If a child says, “It’s hot because the Earth is closer to the Sun in summer,” you can answer, “Summer temperatures are hotter than winter because the Sun’s rays hit this part of Earth more directly in summer than in winter.” Children (and adults) experience natural phenomena and may wonder about those experiences even if we can’t understand them. Fully understanding the Sun-Earth (and Moon) system, including seasons, is a middle school expectation in the Next Generation Science Standards (MS-ESS1-1). While first graders may be expected to “Make observations at different times of year to relate the amount of daylight to the time of year” (NGSS 1-ESS1-2),  fifth graders “Represent data in graphical displays to reveal patterns of daily changes in length and direction of shadows, day and night, and the seasonal appearance of some stars in the night sky” (NGSS 5-ESS1-2) but they are not expected to understand the causes of seasons.

A ball part in shadow and casting a shadow.

Early experiences and investigations that support later understanding of the Sun-Earth-moon system include: 

• manipulating objects and light sources to create shadows (NGSS 1-PS4-3);  
• looking at the Moon using binoculars when it is visible in the day or night; 
• making observations to determine the effect of sunlight on Earth’s surface (NGSS K-PS3-1);
• noticing that when a light is shone on an object, the object casts a shadow and the side of the object away from the light source is in shadow; 
• drawing shadows to notice its relationship to a light source; and 
• observing to notice any pattern in the apparent paths of the Sun across the sky. Over a period of months, does sunlight always shine in the same place every day when observed at a particular time? The Science in PreK site  from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum recommends: “Use language that is accurate but not complicated, such as “The Sun appears to move across the sky,” not to be confused with “The Sun moves across the sky.”” 

These experiences will prepare children to make sense of the apparent shape of the Moon, the phenomena of solar and lunar eclipses, and begin to understand the crosscutting concept of patterns—patterns can be used to identify cause-and-effect relationships—as it relates to the Earth-Sun-Moon system and seasons on Earth.

Resources for these kinds of early explorations

Science in PreK from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum: The Science of Light and Shadows

Peep and the Big Wide World, Explore Shadows teaching strategies and curriculum resources. 

The Moon in Children’s Literature by Kathy Cabe Trundle and Thomas H.Troland. 2005. Science and Children.  43(2): 40-43

The Early Years columns:

December 2017 The Early Years: Using the 5Es to Teach Seasonal Changes. Using a thermometer to investigate and document seasonal changes in the local environment. Science and Children. 55(4): 18-19.

December 2015 The Early Years: The Sun-Earth System. Measuring children’s shadows at two different times of the day. Science and Children.  53(4): 22-23

January 2012. The Early Years: Seeing the Moon. Looking at the Moon, and modeling impact craters. Science and Children  49(5): 26-27.

December 2009 The Early Years: Paths of Light. Using a mirror in an open-ended exploration of light and predicting where light will be reflected. Science and Children. 47(4): 17-18.

March 2009. The Early Years: Does Light Go Through It?. Using light to explore transparent, translucent, and opaque materials. Science and Children. 46(7): 16-18.

March 2007. The Early Years: The Sun’s Energy. Growing plants in sunlight and without light, playing with light and shadow, and making “sun prints.” Science and Children. 44(7): 18-20.

January 2007. The Early Years: Light Foundations. Exploring the path of light. Science and Children. 44(5): 16-18